In fairness, paying for a license like that is one of the clearest cases where the money has a specific and direct result, so one could argue (in fact, I guess I am arguing this) that that's a perfect example of a stretch goal. I do agree that it isn't exciting, and I am sad about that, but IMHO this is one of the more important additions they could make; having all the fancy cool features possible doesn't help much if many average users stumble and trip on pain points like the tablet failing to load their card they've been using.

We can always pester the sailors to add features like splitscreen later but without a non-zero amount of cash they can't afford a license and that's hard to do post-launch, and in the meantime I'd suspect mainstream tech sites will make a bit deal about how it's so unpolished and use how their cards weren't supported as an example . . .

I'm very sympathetic to the point of view of giving Microsoft (and in general any patent fee enforcer) as little money as possible, but it's part of the damned SDXC standard in this case, so it seems like just too much of an uphill battle. Rather we bite our lips and soldier onwards, getting free and open source software in more folks' hands---and then in the future, if companies try and push some proprietary standard, maybe folks will object to that because it doesn't work with their great Jolla tablet!